The Veil is Lifted and My Mourning Period Has Ended

Since the Expos left Canada, I have been without a team to follow. As a result, my interest in the sport has wained somewhat and there's definitely been no passion for the game. I've still been keeping up with the headlines but haven't gone much further than that. I've decided to take off my symbolic black veil, move on from Les Expos and pick a new team to cheer for. But I'm still not rooting for the Blue Jays.

Ever since I first started following baseball about two decades ago I've had the "home country" Jays shoved down my throat. Let's put it this way, the team got such unbalanced coverage up here that I thought Manny Lee was a half-decent player. Even when they went on their run of supremacy in the early 1990s, I still loathed them. My feelings towards them haven't changed much.

Growing up on the west coast, the other "home town" team was the Seattle Mariners. They made the local news a lot but they were never shoved down my throat. And thanks to a design-the-mascot contest I entered when I was ten, they were the first team to send me free swag and small spot in my heart (yes, I can be bribed to a certain extent). Yet even with my Alvin Davis Mariner buck and bumper sticker, I couldn't pull myself to cheer for the Mariners either at the time.

But times have changed. I'm in search of a team and they're the best thing that's out there for me. With the signing of Canadian Erik Bedard the Mariners now have both the home town connection and the Canadian connection. I hereby declare that the Mariners are now the baseball team that I will cheer for. There I said it. It's on the books so when my team beats your team to a pulp you can't say I was a bandwagon jumper.

I honestly don't feel a huge passion for the team yet. The starting pitching may be strong but that's about it. I guess I'll just have to have the faith and wish that the mojo will come back. And Ken Griffey Jr. too. Start your letter-writing campaign to bring Junior home. It's not his home home, but baseball needs him here.

Even with the Mariners being my team now, don't expect me to go out and start collecting them all. I've got enough holes in my Expos wants to keep me busy for quite some time still. I'll pick away at Bedard cards but I'd have done that anyway seeing as how he's Canadian.

My hope is that my passion for baseball will return this year and I'll enjoy the game more. I've discovered over the past couple of years that without a team, it's hard to get excited about anything, even the Yankees getting spanked out of the playoffs year after year. Without a team there's no connection. I want that connection so let's go Mariners (man, that sounds weird - or looks weird, depending on how you read)!